MPEG-4 to H.264/AVC transcoding

In this paper, we consider the problem of MPEG-4 visual simple profile to H.264/AVC baseline profile (BP) transcoding. An efficient transcoding algorithm with fast mode selection and motion vector refinement is proposed. The proposed algorithm exploits the side information from the decoding stage to predict the coding modes and MVs of H.264/AVC BP coding. The proposed algorithm consists of two parts: INTRA macroblocks (MBs) transcoding and INTER MBs transcoding. By reusing the side information during the decoding stage, these techniques provide significant complexity reduction, when compared with the fully spatial domain approach.